Coming This September: The Antichrist

Mark your calendar. This September 15th, the Worldwide Christian Family Missions Network presents “Antichrist: The Reality Show.”

Six contestants will compete over six weeks and complete six projects. They’ll use every underhanded, dastardly, sneaky trick in the book (not the Good Book, of course) to succeed.

We all know that the world is going to hell, that the Apocalypse is due with Armageddon right behind it. The Rapture might be complete by this fall and some of us are going to be left behind. We’ll need our TV programs more than ever then.  Good news. The Antichrist will be in the house!

We’ve lined up six Antichrist candidates. It wasn’t hard. They’re all over the place. Google “Antichrist.” Recognize any of the images?

Our contestants aren’t crazy, except like a fox. They’re smooth. Slick. They’ve fallen but they can get up; they just don’t want to.

The winner’s prize: a superchurch built to his or her specs. (Yes, the Antichrist might look like a woman. Except for those cloven hooves!). When we announced this prize, it brought many true devotees of The Horned One out of their holes to audition.

First week: The Flock.  All six candidate Antichrists are sent out to gather their flocks of believers. There should be plenty of babes and hunks in each flock. There should be some rich folks in each flock. Actually, it would be best if everybody in the flocks were rich. Let’s avoid the 99%. They’re you.

Flock members must be demonstrably in their master’s thrall. Yet they shouldn’t be nuts. It’s a fine line.

Every week,  one Antichrist will be voted off the show by a jury of Catholic and Protestant clergy, Evangelical ministers, and members of churches you’ve never heard of. Everyone on the jury will have been accused, at least once, of crimes the Antichrist would be proud of.

Second Week: Money. The six flocks head out to spend the week gathering money. The personal wealth of flock members does not count. We assume that the Antichrist will have already taken control of all such assets on his own, during the enthrallment process. The flocks can steal money, grift it, embezzle it, print it, employ blackmail, pocket-picking, heists, strong-arm extortion, loan sharking and other forms of usury, protection rackets, bookmaking, you name it, just rake in the lucre. Pile up the scratch. Of course, each Antichrist is apt to fall back on his or her special talents and experience here.

Low flock is voted off. The producers will take charge of that pile of loot.

Third Week: Sex. Each Antichrist will spend Week 3 involving his or her flock in a series of bizarre, acrobatic, and crowd-pleasing sexual shenanigans beyond anything you’re likely to dream up in anticipation. Points for activities that Jesus wouldn’t do, crimes against nature, and behavior that causes you to say “Now that’s just going too far!”

Group sensitivity sessions should be interjected, so that flock members can relive what they’ve done, over and over again, to their delight or everlasting shame, depending upon that cup half empty/cup half full thing. Points deducted for police raids, disease, and defections from the flock of those who unaccountably come to their senses.

A third would-be Antichrist and his or her flock are dismissed this week. The producers will snag those among his or her followers who made them the most horny as they previewed the show. Deleted scenes will be sold to a porno company secretly connected to the network.

Fourth Week: Good Works. Hey, Antichrists. What can you do for the show’s producers? Last week’s good ratings, earned by your hour of wall-to-wall sex, aren’t going to count for anything this week. In fact, forget ratings. The time has come to step up and make us happy on a personal level.

What will it take? A cut of the money pie? Yard work and house cleaning for our wives? Or should you Antichrists turn your skills and the skills of your flock to the seduction of us producers ourselves? Whatever it is, it better be good.

Fourth contestant and flock are voted off. If the producers are insufficiently satisfied with this Antichrist’s offering this week – if the producers are plain pissed off by it – he or she will be consigned to the pit where the wolves are kept. To be filmed, of course.

Fifth Week: Politics. With all the fun out of the way, the show takes a serious turn in Week 5. The Antichrists must achieve dominion over the peoples of the world. The two remaining contestants have one week to do that.  How far can they go? How successful can they be? Control over Staten Island? Enslavement of the Teamsters? Dictatorship of the Mexican cartels?  Now is the time for our Evil Ones to really show us what they’ve got.

Sixth Week: The Final Battle. In Week Six, the surviving Antichrist takes on Jesus Christ Himself. Christ is not going to just show up and flash his SAG card. Instead, we’ll put out a casting call and a bunch of nondescript guys will audition. He’ll come like a thief in the night. We’ll pick Him because that’s how religion works.

The final battle will take place in our special iron-cage Pentagon. Both parties will be armed. Only one will walk away, but don’t worry about injuries. These are supernatural entities, or ought to be.

You might figure that Christ is bound to win. It’s in the Bible. However, the Lord moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform. Jesus might have to wait for the sequel.

Reality Show: Tea Party!

There is a lot of Tea-Party interest and energy out there. This show is designed to draw in viewers who want to learn more about the phenomenon. I’ve been shopping the idea around Hollywood and there is quite a nice little bidding war going on for it between the major reality-show players.

The show recruits three teams of thirteen rabid Tea-Party members each – thirteen,  or however many states there were at the beginning of the country. Twelve? Eleven? Whatever.

Or thirteen teams of three members each. I forget which I decided upon.

Every week for five weeks, the teams go out and throw a major protest on a given theme. Best protest wins the week.

Protest themes:

Child Care – We’re not talking about child-care programs for normal people, like the one down at Messiah Lutheran. We’re talking about those crazy programs like Head Start, where the government pays somebody to take care of the kids of welfare mothers, who can then go home and collect their checks from the state while eating chocolates and drinking beer on the couch. Protest hint: put super glue on the rocking-horse rockers.

Emergency Room – Have you ever got an ouchie and headed down to the emergency room at your local hospital for some TLC? You walk through the doors and WTF?!? The place is overflowing with gunshot and stab victims, drug addicts, and those same welfare mothers with their sick kids (germs caught at Head Start, no doubt). Your earnings are taxed right out of your wallet and sent to the hospital to pay for care for these losers with no health benefits of their own. Protest hint: bring a mean clown.

Soup Kitchen – What a great place for a protest. You probably won’t see much soup. I don’t know where they get it, but these places often serve actual meat, in the form of hot dogs or whatever. I’m sure that the governmentkeeps these soup kitchens open for business (who knows why), using the money that you’ve been saving to pass on to your own children. The death tax sweeps it up, right out of your family’s hands. Protest hint: bring a big truck and give everybody in the building a lift out of town.

Jail – These locations are loaded with the worst of the worst, and the government taxes you to put them up there. Most jails are little more than criminal hotels. Why should you even be working when Obama has already spent the money you hope to earn? Protest hint: to win this one, you have to end up in jail yourself.

Grand Finale:  Starbucks – Do you have any conception of the number of liberal hare-brained schemes that are dreamed up in these lairs. And every one of those schemes depends upon your savings for its funding. Protest hint: bring a gallon of gas and a match.

After watching this show, will you go out and hold a protest of your own? If you love America you will.

Reality Show: When Nuns Marry Nuns

I’ve already sold this one, so don’t bother trying to rip it off.

The studio searches the nation, the world if necessary, to find five nun couples who secretly want to get married. A ten-week competition is held. Each week the viewers vote. The winning couple is awarded ten million dollars.

Week 1 – Get married. Viewers will vote on the best wedding. Extra points for lavish. Vegas weddings are always popular, although one of you will have to pretend to be a guy. Hopefully you’re already doing that. Extra points for getting a priest to marry you in a Catholic church, or, failing that, a Catholic bingo hall.

Week 2 – Go on a honeymoon. Extra points for Cancun, if you know what I mean. Extra points for bikinis, but only if you were meant to wear a bikini. Loss of points for public sobriety. Extra points for public fun with your old habits. Flying Nun jokes while drunk are encouraged, but don’t jump off anything higher than two stories.

Week 3 – Buy a house. You’re married. Get out to suburbia and fit in with your neighbors. Extra points for doing this in the Deep South. Develop responses such as “It’s ok, kids. We’re nuns.” Extra points for noisy choppers that set the neighborhood on its ear.

Week 4 – Get a job. You’ve got to live. Points for best resume filled with lies. Watch “The Riches.” Watch “Catch Me If You Can.”

Week 5 – Adopt. The obvious next step. The more kids you adopt, the more points you get. Comedy endears you to the viewers: try dressing all your little boys as girls, and vice versa.

Week 6 – Fix your car. You’re driving down the freeway and you blow a gasket. Pull over and fix it. Full set of tools and instruction manuals in the trunk. Bang your knuckles and swear like a sailor.

Week 7 – Fight off an intruder in your home. This guy is here not only to rob you but to despoil you, and your kids, and your lovable spaniel, and your cats. Blow him away. Points for largest caliber used and highest number of intruder pieces scattered around after you cease firing. Points for blowing the smoke out of your muzzle when you’re done.

Week 8 – Cheat on your mate. At least one, and perhaps both, of you newlyweds must cheat, preferably in a sordid lesbian dive over in the poor part of town. Fiery arguments follow, featuring expressions not often heard in the convent, such as “cheap whore.”

Week 9 – Negotiate a successful divorce. Your marriage irreparably damaged, you must find a couple of legal eagles to prey upon you and dissolve your union in such a way that no worldly goods remain to either of you.

Week 10 – Return to the cloister. The two of you must find an order that will accept you back and you must return to the convent with your tails between your legs.

The winning couple is determined from the accumulated votes of the viewers. Regardless of the total, the couple must have completed all ten tasks successfully. Hence, the ten-million dollar prize will be turned over to the Church, as the nuns won’t be allowed to accept it themselves due to the rules of their order.

Reality Show: Sports Wives

Screenwriters: Write up your reality-show sports ideas and they will make you some money, irregardless of their stupidity and questionable value to the human race on our warming planet. Write them up, buy new cars, and spew carbon while you still can, before the government takes away our cars and makes us ride bicycles. In fact, you could… Aw, forget it.

Sample idea: Sports Wives

You find five wives whose husbands are sports nuts. The guys watch anything and everything. They tailgate. They buy merchandise. So forth. The wives have had it up to here. If they have to pick up one more empty beer can in the living room, they’re going to scream.

Pick a sport for the five women to take up, say, boxing.

Don’t pick women who can’t take a punch.

Don’t pick women who are all hat and no saddle. Or is it, all saddle and no spurs? Or all assless chaps and no garters? Whatever.

They can have a mouth on them.

If they have a lot of brothers, that’s a plus.

Not too butch, though. Sure, butch might help our contestants in the ring but we’re not selling this show to the gay demo.

If they smoke, it helps. They’re in their corner during a sparring session, taking a last drag on a butt and then flipping it into the mouthwash bucket, while on a split screen we see the husband howling for his f-ing dinner while the children cower behind a KFC Family Box of chicken legs.

Pick  five different colors for the trunks, with matching halters. Each contestant should need a lot of halter, if you know what I mean.

Each week, these women beat the hell out of each other. Wait! Make that six  women, not five. Six different racial ethnicities, although all the husbands should be white. Six different heights, from awesomely tall and leggy to ultra petite but perfectly formed. No fatties, needless to say. Three passive, three aggressive would probably work the best.

After each week’s bouts, we see the women partying with their trainers. The women are all banged up with bandaids and shiners, but in a sexy way, while on the split screen, the husbands are calling the kids’ grandmas to come over and give them baths and put them to bed, because there’s a game on, but we’ve bought off the grandmas so they won’t go.

In the final episode, the women come home and when their husbands try to bust their balls, the women smack the hell out of them.

Reality Show: An Election

Election time is coming, screenwriters. Time to throw your script into the ring. You can include a scene in it where men throw their hats into the ring. I haven’t seen that in a while. I don’t even know what it means.

Anyway. Here’s an idea that I’ve been selling on my professional scriptwriting site. I’m making it available to you for free, for only $9.99.

You go to Mississippi, if you don’t already live there, and find an uncontested state congressional district out in the sticks somewhere. The voters in the district are  white and only white. The district will be Republican. The incumbent should be a very old man. You will encourage him not to run again. I am not using the words “bribe” or “threaten.” If he doesn’t go along with you, I’m not using the words “get rid of him.”

With the incumbent out of the way, it’s time for you to line up your reality list of candidates. Any “real” candidates from the area should be dealt with in the same manner as the incumbent. Dollars are best but if your budget is limited, go watch the original Walking Tall a couple of times.

Since this is an all-white district in the Deep South, none of your candidates will be white. Remember the key to any good reality show: conflict, conflict, conflict.

Your contestents:

Confidence man – This guy will be almost identical to an actual politician.

Housewife – Large family. Never had a job. Never been out of the house. Husband doesn’t believe in it. You’ll be dressing her sexy for those outings where she presses the flesh. There will be viewer chuckles every time her husband goes apoplectic.

Mexican – Dresses like a migrant worker. Very limited English. The other candidates keep challenging him to produce proof that he’s a citizen but he just smiles, not caving in like Obama did. But then, Obama managed to come up with that “long-form” birth certificate somewhere.

Preacher man – Find a guy who can’t control his religious rants.

Sixties civil-rights activist – Even today, fifty years later, these fellows can raise hackles.

Ensure all the contestants, in case of an unplanned Klan lynching.

Plan for lots of campaigning in the WalMart parking lot. The look on those crackers’ faces when the candidates ask for their votes will make the show.

Each episode will end with a straw vote. The candidate who garners the most votes wins for the week. Most likely, no votes will be cast for any of them, but the confidence man may manage to buy one or two and the activist might sneak in a voter who can “pass.”

Finally, election night. Throw a party at which all the candidates become immoderately drunk. The townsfolk will have planned a party of their own. Film it. They still use hot tar and feathers down there.

Reality Show: Funerals

You may have been to one or more funerals (though I hope not). You’ve seen a million of them on TV and in the movies, and they’re all the same. Whereas weddings are all over the place, themewise.

This reality show, which I wrote, is now in pre-production. It’s called “Design a Funeral.”

There are five contestants:

– An interior designer

– A birthday clown/magician

– A wedding planner’s assistant

– An embalmer

– A lounge singer

Each week the contestants are provided with a funeral theme, venue, and budget and must each stage their own version of a funeral. An actor’s corpse is provided in the interest of verisimilitude There are five themes and the shows air every other week.

The themes/venues:

1. Public Pool – The pool is rented as for a big birthday party. The guests assemble at the bottom of the deep end, breathing via scuba equipment. The coffin is secured to the bottom of the pool. All oration is performed with the mouth uncovered to the water, so that it just sounds like burbling talk sounds, thus eliminating the most annoying aspect of funerals. When that’s finished, the coffin is loosed and floats up to the surface, symbolizing ascension to heaven, as all look up through their goggles. Later in the year, the mourners return and throw flower bouquets into the lanes during lap swimming.

2. The 101 – The hearse, and limos abreast, and more limos ranked in three rows behind, cruise down the 101 at the height of rush hour, at the four miles per hour typical at that time. The fleet brakes to a stop, creating instant gridlock behind and a maddeningly clear freeway ahead. The mourners jump out and the pallbearers extract the coffin from the hearse. A few quick words are spoken, hard to hear over the blare of hours and the shouts and curses of hundreds of frustrated drivers, crazy in the L.A. heat. The coffin is bourne over to the concrete divider to the left, and quickly shoved/tossed into the HOV lane heading in the opposite direction. The coffin is easily manipulated because it is made of paper and contains only the ashes of the deceased. Vechicles in the HOV lane quickly reduce the coffin to paper fragments and the ashes of the deceased are ground into the asphalt for a mile down the road. Later in the year, the mourners return and, car-pooling so that they qualify, cruise down the HOV lane scattering flowers through their open windows as they go.

3. Rock Concert – The deceased is brought to the concert, with a mourner on each side supporting him or her under the armpits. He/she isn’t too heavy, as his/her internal organs and so forth have been removed. He/she is going goth. He/she, at the proper time, will be projected into the mosh pit to surf. The mourners will return later, after the drugs have worn off, and try to find the body.

4. La Brea Tar Pits – The mourners will assemble behind the back wall of the tar-pit attraction at 2 A.M. on a weekday, with ladders and grappling equipment. They will scale the wall with the body of the deceased and gather inside at the edge of the hottest, deepest tar pit. After a few words have been spoken, about the  origin of the tar pits and the animals that have been trapped and perished in them, a metaphor for modern life, if I may presume, delivered by a bribed young employee who does the tours there, the deceased will be weighed down, if necessary, and consigned to the tar, there to be entombed until excavated and put on display at some future time. The mourners will return on the weekend to enjoy the pits as paying customers.

5. Wedding – The corpse in its coffin will be conveyed to the largest, most traditional wedding being held during prime time in the L.A. area. When questioned at the door by the wedding planner and the father of the bride, the mourners will claim that they have in fact reserved the church and that the Catholics have double-booked the chapel just to make an extra buck. Or the Jews, if this is a temple or synagogue. An argument will ensue. The bride will emerge. There will be tears. She will ask why the groom isn’t out there sticking up for their marriage. She will go in search of the groom, who will be discovered with the maid of honor. Meanwhile, the coffin will have been bourne in to the apse, if that’s the word I want. Bourne in to wherever the priest or rabbi is waiting, and put down. The cleric will be told to deliver a eulogy, at gunpoint if necessary. All the bridal floral wreaths and other flowers will be confiscated and bourne away with the coffin, which will be fit somehow into the trunk of the Just Married car, half of it sticking out in back. A red handkerchief will be tacked onto it for safety. The car will drive away (rice, no; tin cans on strings, yes) and once it’s out in some neighborhood, the coffin and its contents will be ditched on a front lawn and the mourners will all go to the beach to party. They will return to the church at some later date to sit listening to the sermon and then will put buttons in the collection basket.

Reality Show: Dogs

This is an old idea. Several shows have started production based on it, only to be shut down for one reason or another. Put together the right package and you and your agent will find yourself greenlit before you can lift your leg on the nearest fire hydrant.

First, choose the dogs – You’ll need at least one who doesn’t get along with other dogs. Conflict is important. Also, a cute one – a flirty bitch. Plus a big, muscled lug, a crafty, foxy one, and a nerdy mutt who thinks too much. You’ve got to have a Chihuahua that’s a little crazy and one of those dogs big as a small pony. Make one of those male and the other female.

The series transpires on a lush tropical island, of course. There is a beautiful luxury home, an obstacle course, jungle, a waterfall – scenery, in other words.

No human is ever seen. This is a dog show. People aren’t welcome, especially those struggling actors that show up in reality shows every week, hoping that you don’t recognize them from their work in commercials.

Each week, the dogs vote one of the pack off the island. How is this done? Well, you know, they don’t literally vote. Figure something out with that nose-to-ass sniffing thing, maybe.

What you can’t avoid here, with no human people in the show, is a pack of dogs running around more or less aimlessly for an hour every week. Say one week the show opens on the beach. There’s the dogs, whichever are left by this time. They’ve been let out on the beach. They don’t know. They’ve been fed. They run this way. They run that way. Some of them like water. Some of them hate water. But even the ones that like water aren’t going to just run out into the fracking ocean. You’ve got to at least throw a god-damned stick out there, or something. A frisbee. But you can’t, because you aren’t there. Nobody is.

Or another week, the show opens in a clearing in the jungle. There they are, the dogs, in the clearing. Do they disappear into the jungle? Say you put a tiger out there. Do they cringe or do they run after it. A tiger could take a pack of housebred dogs easy. Tear them up. Do they know that? Or if it’s a python? It would have to be a hungry one. Otherwise, they hang up in the trees like a vine. You’ve got nothing.

Or, and this is the last suggestion and then you’re on your own. I can’t give you everything. They’re up at the top of the island’s volcano. It’s rumbling, it’s steaming, it’s going to blow. Will the dogs push one of their own into the lava to save the pack? You’ve got to keep saying over and over that no dogs were hurt during the filming of this show, even if it’s bullshit, or PETA will put you in a world of hurt. But then having said that, it’s a pack of fracking dogs. A dogpack. They return to the wild at the drop of a hat. Haven’t you ever had one of those things turn on you? I’m more into aquariums myself, but you know how dogs can be. If you’ve got a pit bull or two in there, even with expert handlers and with them getting thrown off the island, or into the lava, you’ll be lucky if they don’t manage to bite you at least once.

Reality Show: “1,000 Lbs of Love”

This project has been funded by a broadcast network, but is awaiting the signing of the two protagonists in the show.

A special RV sits in Van Buren, Maine, in the farthest north-east corner of the continental U.S. Another waits in Imperial Beach, California, south of San Diego and Chula Vista, in the farthest south-west corner of the country. 3,459 miles separate the two vehicles and their human cargos.

On each RV, built to take the load, lies an individual weighing in at 500 lbs exactly. Myrtle and Fred.

Also on-board each RV, an MD specializing in extreme weight loss, and a lab capable of monitoring body chemistry during the weight-loss process.

The two RVs will set out and head for the opposite corner of the country. They’ll pass each other at the half-way point, on the outskirts of Rolla, Missouri, where they will stop briefly while Myrtle and Fred meet first the first time. Up until now, it’s all been email, IM, Facebook, tweets, and Skype.

From the outset, the RVs will progress slowly, because by the time they reach Rolla, Fred and Myrtle will weigh only 300 pounds each.

The skin is the body’s largest organ. Lose several hundred pounds and you will discover your skin organ hanging in folds. In Rolla, a plastic surgeon will tighten up Fred and Myrtle from head to toe. Bariatric surgery. The couple will be doing a lot of pain killers. These will provide their face-to-face interactions at a rustic picnic ground with a dreamlike quality.

The show: many ups and downs. Many highs and lows. Fred looses 80 pounds and realizes that, at 420 pounds, he is still far from his goal of 165. He rebels but his contract with the network is air-tight. The producers can starve him at will, as long as they don’t actually kill him. Four thuglike individuals follow the RV in a Crown Vic all the way across the U.S., for the purpose of strapping Fred down to his bed when necessary.

Myrtle tries to apply makeup for her first appearance on the show. At 500 pounds, she has a lot of face space to fill in with her liquid foundation. She runs out before she gets any lower than her nose.

In Pharisburg, Ohio, Fred sees a part of himself long hidden from direct view. He is impressed.

Time and again, Fred and Myrtle talk about food, but the network must cut away on the basis of good taste.

Reality Show: “The Love Trip”

Five men and five women in a deluxe RV, traveling from New York to Hollywood. Purpose of the trip: Love.

The men and women have been carefully chosen from a pool of thousands of applicants. Although they don’t know it, they share a common characteristic. They are all profoundly disinterested in sex.

They aren’t phobic. There are no psychoses. These are simply the ten least libidinally motivated heterosexuals available in all the general Reality public.

The ten think that the man and woman on this trip who couple up and discover truest, deepest love will “win.” They don’t know that the actual winners will be the first couple to have surreptitious sex – sex that they believe, wrongly, will be off-camera.

How will the physical act creep up on these folks, who never even think about it? Take Nigel, for example. He was in a two-year relationship with a young woman who had no natural lubrication. Nigel didn’t know about lubrication – still doesn’t – and his mate didn’t either. Folks used to go and get a lube job for their cars from time to time, along with an oil change, but nobody knows about that these days. Anyway, after two years of desert-dry, chafing, prickly, raw intercourse, Nigel lost all interest in ever doing it again, with anybody.

Similarly, Enid. She was introduced to the act of love by a fellow so proportionally outsized that once they were done and she could walk normally again, Enid unconsciously removed all further questions, desires, and plans for a repeat from her mental equipment.

Obviously, nothing would happen on this RV trip without a little help from the producers. Without intervention, there would be no winners and, of course, no tape of the winning maneuvers.

Intervention One: Clothing Malfunction in Mt. Giliad, Ohio. The participants are told that body lice have been discovered on the vehicle and every scrap of clothing and bedding must be steam-cleaned immediately. They wheel into the Sunnyside Naturist Garden for their layover. The ten contestents now discover/experience each other on a dermatological level while playing volleyball and swimming in the heated pool. Due to broadcast restrictions, even on Starz, we see most of this from the rear.

Intervention Two: “Getting to know you better” games played from Swayzee, Indiana to Doolittle, Missouri. The games are introduced and played during a quick clothing recall/inspection to confirm that the lice have been truly licked.

Intervention Three: Drugs at the Seama Rest Stop on I40 in New Mexico. The producers throw up their hands at this point and slip powerful drugs into the contestants’ roadside picnic dinner. Within an hour after sunset, five couples are mating like rabbits and the producers must do a frame-by-frame analysis of the tapes to determine who started first and thus “won.”

The mood on the RV is light and anticlimactic from New Mexico to Hollywood.

My First Reality Show

Well, my first reality show, “Walk the Walk,” is in production. It will pay me enough to live well for a year.

It was easy. Just get that initial concept, pitch it to the right guys, and you’re in.

“Walk the Walk” is so simple. Each episode begins with five guys in Central Park. In the first episode, they’re furniture movers, real professional guys, all single or divorced. Each one gets a celebrity. He takes her up in his arms and starts walking north out of the park. Maybe one of the guys gets an Uma Thurman or a Kirstie Alley – you know, a real horse – to provide us with a laugh as we watch the guy lugging her like a couch, but for the rest, it’s just normal-sized women stars. No Calista Flockharts or other lightweights with an obvious eating disorder.

So off go these guys, and they can’t put their woman down. Nature takes its course and the guys get more and more tired. Their arms are falling off, for Pete’s sake. The women try to encourage them, keep them going, because there is a prize involved. One woman might insult her guy, call him weak, impugn his manhood, threaten him, so forth. Another might nuzzle him, make promises, anything to keep him from dropping her.

So this goes on as they leave the park and head north on 7th Avenue. Destination: the Bronx Zoo, which is one hell of a hike. One by one, the guys crap out, until there is only one left with a star in his arms. It’s summer and he’s sweating bullets. But now he doesn’t have to cradle her. Now he can carry her piggyback, or reverse-piggyback in front, or on his shoulders. She’s up there with her thighs around his ears, him trudging along through Harlem at two in the morning. The show isn’t on Starz, so we only go so far with the cheese.

They talk. The show is all about them getting to know each other, their hopes, their dreams. The sweat keeps coming. They get a bathroom break at Yankee Stadium. The guy is a mess, which makes him drop his social defenses and get more animal in his conversation. The celebrity is moved by this on a libidinal level. It’s like a damned movie to her.

If they make it to the zoo, they get a free weekend at a B&B in Mamaroneck, which is up on the way to Stamford. The camera doesn’t follow them but as the show’s credits are rolling, we check back with the guy Monday morning as he goes out with his van to help a retired couple move from their apartment in the East 60s over to Bushwick, to be closer to their grandchildren.